The backbone of a cloud is infrastructure. At its core, it is an attempt to deliver compute power, networking and storage as efficiently and responsively as possible. Every serious public cloud player has its own industry-leading approach.
From cookie sheet computing to custom networking gear to open-sourced infrastructure, …

Hmm

The private cloud comes in at a scale where its crossing over from SMB to Medium sized business. And you better have the teams in place to cope with the chunky workload the article glosses over. By the time you double checked all the whitelisting, costs, and nightmares, maybe your own old skool servers in a rack will seem in fact a better option.

Microsoft's focus is all on clouds and vast structure. It thinks everyone is like that. They are not.

However, they might evolve that so no one runs their own stuff. But when you reach that scale_you really won't run it yourself, so the last thing you'll want is SVCMM and a bucket load of techs. Why pay and run all that when MS or some other cloud bunch of lunatics already pays absolute bottom dollar to techs in some data centre to screw things up for you anyway. Its much more fun to blame them and not your own teams.

Re: Hmm

If you've got the money for it, SCVMM comes very close to "running itself." If you can afford Microsoft's private cloud, you have techs already. Microsoft's private cloud won't eliminate you need for techs; but it will probably eliminate your need for more techs. The long and short is that it allows you to do more with the same number of people, without completely overloading those existing people.

It allows growth in the amount and types of data you process without a growth in payroll to play nursemaid.

Is it at all suitable for SMEs? No. Absolutely no. Outright beyond a doubt completely unfit. While the tech is grand, and I could run 100 companies as clients if they all used this stuff…the licensing is egregiously out of whack with reality. SMEs simply can’t afford this stuff without a major licensing shakeup.

Mind you, they can’t afford the VMWare licensing for tools of the same quality either, so…I am not sure anyone except the poor SME owners and sysadmins care.

As both an SME owner and a sysadmin, I really, really like Microsoft’s private cloud offerings. I like them better than VMWare or Citrix. But as an SME owner and sysadmin, neither my own business – nor any of my clients – will be buying any of this soon. It’s simply beyond reach. For now – for us – there is KVM.

And that is the reality of life for the foreseeable future. One day, maybe, I will get to own a Microsoft private cloud that doesn’t expire when the trial licences are over. Until then, pass me my bash shell, I’ve got to install Webmin.

why?

Cloud still at the "we only want experts like us playing with them" stage.

I have been toying with VMs (Xen and VirtualBox) as a private enthusiast and I've gotten to the point where I'm happy I have the hang of it. I now wanted to play with Cloud and a lot of distributors are making their product available on trial or (in the case of OpenStack) freely available. But I then hit a wall...

...assumptions are being made and not described. Assumptions which, I am sure, make perfect sense to someone who *knows* Clouds, but over which the rest of us are unsure. For example: Do the boxen in your cloud have to be physical clones of each other or can they be different? If so, *how* different before it starts to matter? I assume that x64 and x32 mix would have an impact, but how much? What about different amounts of RAM? Of HDD? Can you mix i7 and i5 CPUs? What if one box has (for example) a PCIe TV capture card but the others don't - will this card even be visible in "the cloud"?

I have yet to find a decent Cloud 101 primer which answers those basic questions. Plenty of Cookbook for Dummies but, again, they gloss over the basic assumptions of building a cloud and start at "you have the required hardware, let's show you how to create a cloud over them".

Re: Cloud still at the "we only want experts like us playing with them" stage.

Hi NeoC, funny you should bring that up. I actually recently reviewed a Microsoft Virtual Academy track that is probably exactly what you are looking for: Introduction to virtualisation. I have no idea when the review will actually be posted; it's been handed in, and everything from there on is a black box to me. Worth your time if you're looking for the bare basics of virtualisation with a brief intro into "why the cloud?"

If you want a more hands on, here's a review I wrote about a different MVA track. And here is a review I wrote about yet another MVA track that is "OMFGWTF System Center 2012." Combined you will probably learn all you ever wanted to learn (and way more) about cloudy whatever.

I know that sounds like a marketing blurb...but I had to go to all the trouble of watching the smeggling things and then writing reviews; I'd rather just post links to those (and from there you could view the MVA tracks themselves) rather than try to explain clouds, and the why.

As for "Clouds 101"...I've gotten a lot of positive feedback on the previous article in this series (right here) in that regard. I've been told it's not bad for exactly that role.